The line between personality and news gets blurrier everyday and some days, my ability to just look away without public comment is overwhelmed by the sick feeling in my stomach that comes from falsehoods being consumed and repeated across the media spectrum because these falsehoods are designed to be eye-grabbing and not because the public author of them has given it a single thought greater than the fact that they could gather some attention.
I get angry.
And I get frustrated.
I get as frustrated with the public – some of whom are professional journalists – as I do with the self-aggrandizing sources of this kind of “news” because all that is require to change the dynamic is, in the case of journalists, the tiniest amount of attention to detail and history. And yet this seems to be beyond the level of interest in doing the job these days.
And I completely understand that when these moments of bubbling over come up, it can read like some sort of personal issue. It doesn’t help that people like Patrick Goldstein now use major dying outlets like the LA Times to go little past the personal these days.
Anyway…
Today’s drama starts, as it often does, with Nikki Finke.
Apparently, everyone – starting with Nikki – has quickly forgotten that the same person who got it dead wrong in July when she was being fed spin by Harry Sloan’s operatives that everything at MGM was looking up in back-to-back EXCLUSIVEs – “GOOD NEWS FOR MGM: Audit Will Show Struggling Studio Is A “Going Concern” and “TOLDJA! MGM Audit Shows Full Compliance With All Debt Covenants; EXCLUSIVE UPDATE: Studio Library Valued At $5.5B” – is now the person they are quoting as gospel as she finally is being fed the “news” that everyone who was actually seriously considering what was happening at MGM knew was inevitable from the time Harry Sloan pulled the already flailing situation away from Sony in the arrogant believe that he could rebuild a dying library valuation into an empire again.
The new EXCLUSIVE…”EXCLUSIVE DETAILS: MGM Makes Phone Plea To Bondholders To Stay Alive; Both ‘Hobbit’ And James Bond In Peril; Bondholders Tell Studio To Go Bankrupt; MGM Calls That Worst Possible Outcome”
And now, of course, we have media all over the place jumping on the Big Lie of the headline… that MGM’s fate will define the fate of these two partnered projects.
Anyone with a brain and any sense of the players would instantly understand that neither Barbara Broccoli and Warner Bros are going to allow their franchises to be derailed by the situation at MGM. And they don’t have to. There is money available for both projects to move forward. And even if MGM went bankrupt, no bankruptcy judge on the planet would stop significant incoming revenue -especially without a cash layout – to be created and absorbed into the company on the inflated notion by whomever is selling this shite to Nikki that maintaining distribution and a cash position in these films in spite of not being able to move forward because of a lack of cash in the company is in the interest of the company.
This is not complex.
And frankly, it is not just Nikki’s fault for being the George W Bush is a town full of Dick Cheneys, never really understanding the agenda, but selling it with all her tiny heart and soul.
When someone writes, “Some say the call lasted 6 1/2 hours. Others said it lasted 2 1/2 hours with lenders, and then the lenders themselves had a conference call that lasted another 2 hours,” that person is openly acknowledging that they don’t know what actually happened and that there are wildly varying versions of the tale being told. This opening screams, “Take all of this with a grain of salt.” But this is the Nikki-ism of it… she then boils it down to a screaming headline that is neither smart nor accurate, taking full advantage of peoples’ disinterest in actually reading the sometimes obvious subtext of her work.
People don’t want to think too hard and Nikki doesn’t want to do the journalistic job of thinking it out for them. The #1 goal is promoting Nikki, not seeking truth.
And in the current media universe, everything is a writeover waiting to happen. There is no memory. Getting it dead wrong today is not big deal so long as you get it dead wrong tomorrow.

Is there any point, in the midst of this screed, to actually move the MGM story forward? Well, explaining the real story isn’t actually moving the story forward since nothing has changed this week. Truly. Nothing.
The single biggest problem with “fixing” MGM remains the massive devaluation of the very library that Bank of Montreal claimed two months ago was worth $5.5 billion. Someone at BofM should be fired for writing whatever report allowed this lie to be perpetuated. Yesterday, someone told Nikki that the sale of a broken MGM would be worth less than $2 billion. Well… what is it, Nikki? (That’s a rhetorical question… she doesn’t have the slightest idea.)
What Kirk Kerkorian and Chris McGurk (in the last round) understood about MGM and the library was that its value was exactly what they could get someone to pay for it. And the problem with MGM right now is that even if the value of the library is equal to the $3.5 billion in debt that the company is carrying, the idea of the studio as an ongoing concern

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